


A Pretty Good Investigator

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-05-19 16:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5974183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On one sheet was a list of questions he’d typed out. They were questions about genetics and fetal development and surgeries, and they were all about anotia, and they were not about him. They were not about her.</p><p>He didn’t know how to ask those kinds of questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't help myself. These poor people.
> 
> Takes place ~ a few weeks after the events of 10x04, though obviously I have no idea what happens in the next two episodes, so.

She’d barely gotten through her front door when her phone rang. At first she didn’t even recognize the sound - instead of her old ringtone, it was that same tinny song Mulder had on his phone. How could he _possibly_ have figured out how to change her ringtone? He couldn’t even take a damn picture.

She glanced at the screen. Unknown number, unfamiliar prefix. Mulder would’ve known. That photographic memory came in handy occasionally. She sighed and swiped to answer.

“Dana Scully,” she said.

“Hi, Dr. Scully?” The voice at the other end sounded impossibly young.

“This is.”

“Hi.” Nervous, too. “Um, this is Luke Van de Kamp. I’m a sophomore in high school - anyway, I’m doing a research project? I got your phone number from a lady at your hospital.”

She sat down at her kitchen table, lightly drummed her fingers across the wood, wondered who the hell was giving her cell phone number out to teenagers. She waited for him to continue. After a minute of awkward silence, she prompted, “Yes?”

“Well, I’m writing about anotia. You know, kids who - kids who are born without ears.”

A smile teased at the corners of her mouth. “Yes, I’m aware.”

“Oh right. Of course. Well, my teacher said that we have to contact an expert and I saw you on this hospital website, and there was this paper you wrote about it, it’s linked to on Wikipedia. So I was hoping you could be my expert? There aren’t that many people studying this.”

A lesser woman, she mused, might’ve been offended. Dr. Scully, expert of last resort.

“It’s an unusual topic,” she allowed. A bit too unusual, now that she thought about it, for a fifteen-year-old kid to have selected for a research project. “I’m curious, Luke, why you decided to write about anotia.”

“Oh! Uh, my cousin is like that. Well, kind of. He has microtia. You know, the other kind.”

Plausible enough. “What do you need from me?” she asked.

The kid sighed, a sound she immediately recognized as relief. She had to give him credit: it wasn’t an easy thing, calling up an adult out of the blue to ask for a favor. “Well, I was sort of hoping we could meet and I could ask you a few questions. I mean, if you have time. I know you’re busy. Sorry. I know it’s a lot to ask.”

Scully laughed. His nervousness was charming, she had to admit. “It’s fine. You’re in D.C., right?”

There was a pause. Crackling on the line. “Luke?”

His voice came back. “Uh, yeah. Yeah. I’m in D.C. I’m pretty busy with, you know, sports and stuff this week, but what about next weekend? It won’t take too long, I promise.”

She flipped through her mental calendar. Not much on it, these days. “Sure.” 

They worked out the details, typing sounds in the background on his end. In the end they settled on the central library, a week from Sunday. Scully jotted it down on her actual calendar and wished the boy good luck with his research.

When she hung up the phone, she was still smiling. _See, you’re doing your part for future generations of scientists_ , she thought, only half joking.

This would be good. Something to distract her from all of the other noise - from the X-Files, from Mulder, from her mother. Something easy.

* * *

He couldn’t believe it was going to work. It had all been so _easy_ \- maybe _too_ easy. She - _Dr. Scully_ , he reminded himself - hadn’t even hesitated. And this morning, when the rest of the sophomore class of Glenrock High School had gone off on a tour of the Capitol, Luke had feigned a migraine. Everybody knew he got them. Mr. Dunham, the social studies teacher, had dispensed a couple of Imitrex, told Luke to rest up (like that would solve the problem), and headed off with the rest of the group.

Leaving Luke alone in the hotel with a cell phone, $50 his parents gave him for souvenirs, and an address.

An address.

He’d looked up the directions on Google Maps a hundred times since he called her last week. It looked easy enough. They were staying right near the Capitol - he should be able to walk.

So he just had to do it.

It was warmer in D.C. than it had been back home, and pink flowering trees everywhere. _This is where she lives_ , he told himself. This is where _he_ could’ve—

No. He was not going to do that. That was the one thing he’d promised himself, back six months ago when he’d finally, _finally_ figured out who she was: that he wouldn’t let it change things. He loved his parents. He didn’t hate Wyoming. He didn’t really want his life to change.

Luke just wanted to _know_.

And he knew as soon as he saw her.

She was at a table not far from the front door, looking at her phone. She was pretty, for someone his mom’s age, with reddish hair and blue eyes that looked familiar even from a distance. They were just the same as his: a blue so bright that his mom’s friends had been commenting on it his whole life.

Luke knew it was weird to just stand here watching her, but he couldn’t help it. She looked so - _normal_. In a black business suit with her hair and make-up all nice - she wasn’t Glenrock-normal, she was TV show-normal, and for the first time he could remember, he felt a surge of anger.

Why wasn’t she a heroin addict, or way too young, or - or something, _anything_ other than this. _You knew she was a doctor_ , he reminded himself. _You knew_. 

It was part of what had made this all so easy. Easy enough to find out what papers she’d published, and, with the help of the school librarian and his AP Bio teacher, to actually get ahold of them and read them. He’d exhausted most of the school’s books - and curriculum - and he’d already skipped one year of school, so the teachers mostly let him do what he wanted. 

And if what he wanted was an excuse to contact Dr. Dana Scully, well, that was easy enough to disguise as a purely academic interest. _Couldn’t have done that if she was a heroin addict_ , he thought.

Luke pulled out his phone. There was no good reason for him to recognize her from across the room. No reason for him to have looked at every picture of her he could find online, seeking traces of himself in the shape of her chin, the color of her eyes, the freckles on her nose. He sent her a text.

_Hi. I’m standing in the lobby._

Her phone didn’t make a sound, but he knew she’d gotten it: a raised eyebrow and a quick glance up from her phone.

And a flinch.

* * *

The boy stood a hundred feet away from her, and he was - he was _impossible_.

Scully felt her heart stop.

He was tall - gangly, in the way of teenaged boys who haven’t fully grown into their growth spurts - with a mop of brown hair and bright blue eyes, freckles sprinkled liberally across his nose and cheeks - and his _nose_ ; if she’d ever doubted who had fathered this boy, well, that was gone—

Scully forced her jaw shut. No. That was impossible. Whatever she was thinking, it was _impossible_. It was just the stress of these last few weeks - her mom, and Bill, and everything else - she was seeing things that weren’t there. This was just a boy. _Not even the right age_ , she reminded herself. Her son - she can’t allow herself to think his name, not right now - her son would only be a freshman. He’d be fifteen in May.

God.

She steeled herself - she’d had a lot of practice at that over the years - and stood up, giving the boy what she hoped was a normal-looking smile.

And he walked toward her.

* * *

They shook hands and Luke knew his were cold and sweaty, but she didn’t say anything about it. He sat down across from her at the table, and he could feel his pulse about ready to jump out of his throat. Trying to hide his shaking hands, he started digging through his backpack, rifling through the sheaf of papers he’d stashed inside. Mostly things she’d written, or newspaper articles about her work. 

One sheet was a list of questions he’d typed out. They were questions about genetics and fetal development and surgeries, and they were all about anotia, and they were not about him. They were not about her.

He didn’t know how to ask those kinds of questions.

“So,” she said, “you had some questions for me?”

Luke nodded and started running through the questions on his sheet. He wrote her answers out longhand, in a composition notebook; their only computer was a shitty desktop that could barely even go online, so he was used to writing stuff by hand. He had pretty good handwriting, at least compared to his classmates.

It turned out she was easy to talk to. She smiled easily, and once or twice she even laughed - a bright, warm sound. And she didn’t talk down to him either. She answered his questions thoroughly, explaining concepts that were new to him, but in the same way a really good teacher would - like she was happy to tell him about it, and she expected him to understand.

“You’ve really done your research,” she commented at one point, clearly impressed.

He blushed. “I like school,” he mumbled.

“Well, you must be good at it, with the way you’ve applied yourself to this. What school did you say you go to?”

 _Shit_. He wracked his brain for the name of a town nearby, _any_ town. His memory was usually perfect, nearly photographic, but his nerves were clearly getting to him. “Uh, Bethesda?” he ventured.

“Bethesda Chevy Chase?”

Luke nodded, relieved. “Yeah.”

Her eyes were piercing. “And you’re a sophomore?”

“Yeah. But I skipped a grade.”

Dr. Scully sat back in her chair, arms crossed, and examined him. He tried not to stare back, watching her do the math, and after a minute she just said, “Hmm.” And the moment passed.

Luke worked his way down the list of questions, and once he’d run out he came up with a few more, but after a while he ran out of plausible-sounding anotia questions. And the real questions were too close to his lips.

“I guess that’s it,” he said, trying not to sound disappointed.

Her expression mirrored his. “Well, if you think of anything else, feel free to get in touch.”

“I will. Thanks for meeting with me, Dr. Scully. I really appreciate it.”

She gives him one more smile, warm and not a little bit sad. “It was my pleasure, Luke.”

He dug out a wallet-sized school picture from his backpack and scribbled down his e-mail address on the back: [_lucas.w.vandekamp@cmail.com_](mailto:lucas.w.vandekamp@cmail.com). “So you’ll remember who I am,” he said lightly.

She took the picture and glanced at the address. “What’s the ‘W’ for?” she asked absently.

He swallowed. “William.” There was no sign of recognition on her face - no sign of any reaction at all - but before he could let his heart sink he plunged forward. “It’s the name my birth mother gave me. I’m adopted.”

 _There_. Her sharp eyes flickered up to him, just for a second, and there was a flash of something - and then the moment was gone, and she gave him a strained smile and said, “It’s a nice name.”

He didn’t want to go, not yet. He had so many questions still. “And you’ll e-mail me that other paper I asked about?”

She nodded, one rogue piece of hair falling in front of her eyes. “I’ll do it tonight. It was nice to meet you, Luke.”

One more time, she shook his hand, and he didn’t think he was imagining that she clasped it a little more firmly this time. And he didn’t think he was imagining the redness around her eyes.

And he knew he wasn’t imagining the tears welling up in his eyes as he turned and walked away.

Slow.

Back to the hotel. Back to his classmates. Back to Wyoming, back to his parents, back to his real life.

Where nothing had changed, except that now he knew.

* * *

Her hands shake all the way home. It takes her three tries to unlock the front door, and when she gets inside, she collapses onto the couch.

After what feels like a century, she manages to call him.

He picks up on the first ring.

“Mulder,” she says. “We need to talk.”

His voice is light, teasing. “You’re working on a _Sunday_? Come on, Scully. You’re falling back into your old habits.”

She wants to explain, but the words get caught in her throat, and before she can stop herself she just says, “ _Please_.”

There’s a pause.

“Are you at your place?” he asks.

She nods, as though he can see her. Corrects it. “Yeah.”

“I can be there in half an hour.”

And he hangs up, but Scully doesn’t put the phone down. Can’t.

Instead she scrolls through her list of recent calls. She thinks about creating a new contact: _Luke Van de Kamp_. No one would know who it was. It would be her secret - and Mulder’s - just knowing it was there. In case.

She thinks about deleting it. She gave him away to protect him, and how could that sacrifice be worthwhile if she kept evidence of his whereabouts in her phone? The same men who had terrified her fourteen years ago are still out there.

After a few minutes, Scully just turns off the phone, placing it face down on the coffee table. She’ll decide what to do about that later.

For now, she takes the school picture out of her wallet, where it’s already well hidden between her library card and an Applebee’s gift card she will never use. She looks at it, at him; she knows he gave it to her on purpose. She figured it out about five minutes after he walked into that library. Even though she and Mulder tried to keep him safe, he’s found them anyway.

Turns out their son is a pretty good investigator.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was so long in coming. I hadn’t really intended to continue this, but it turns out that I have a lot of feelings about parenthood and forgiveness and growing up and this damn show, so this got away from me a little bit. Hope you like it anyway! Your comments & thoughts are always appreciated.
> 
> This takes place a couple years after the first chapter, and incorporates some stuff from my cheesy wedding fanfic “something old / something new” because it is my headcanon & that’s how I roll. It also ignores the events of 10x06, which I think is generally for the best…

October  2018

Dr. Scully kept her promise. Before Luke had gone to bed that night, he'd gotten an e-mail from her with one of her papers attached. The e-mail itself was brief - not terse - and Luke had memorized it in its entirety:

_Dear Luke,_

_I enjoyed meeting you this afternoon. I rarely come across young people with your intelligence, confidence, and curiosity, and it was a pleasure to assist you with your research project._

_The paper you requested is attached. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions about your research topic or any other areas of inquiry._

_From one scientist to another, thank you._

_Dana_

Over the past two and a half years, Luke had thought about that letter a lot. One part in particular: _any other areas of inquiry_.

It seemed like an invitation. Why would she have phrased it like that if she hadn't intended to open the line of communication on the one subject he was most desperate to inquire about?

The last two and a half years had come along with plenty of discoveries. They came in fits and spurts - he’d go months without thinking about it, about her, but then something would happen and he’d start digging again. Since he’d gotten into Georgetown five months ago, his research had really gotten off the ground.

Things like: Dr. Scully was a doctor, but she'd also been an FBI agent on and off for almost thirty years. Someone had even made a movie about her work. He’d watched it, even though he'd had to pay ten bucks for an interlibrary loan from a community college in Saskatchewan, which was apparently the only place in North America that purchased a copy of the VHS. Oh, and he’d had to track down a VCR to play it on.

Dr. Scully had also taught at Quantico, which made him start watching that TV show _Quantico_ , which wasn't a very good show and, he was sure, bore no resemblance to the experience of actually working there - but it still made him feel closer to her.

Luke was also pretty sure that she’d been a fugitive, at least for a while. The timeline he worked out placed that period not long after his birth, so he wondered.

He'd figured out so much, but so many pieces were still missing.

Their brief meeting, the way she wrote that e-mail, her papers in medical journals - all of these things described one kind of person. Someone, he thought with no small amount of pride, a lot like him - clever and driven and hard-working. And _careful_.

The rest of her history had been harder to suss out, even for someone with Luke’s significant sleuthing abilities. He knew his picture was incomplete, but nothing about the rest of her life - her life as an FBI agent - said _careful_. Still driven, still clever, maybe to a fault. But not careful. More like reckless.

From what he’s been able to find, she was working on some weird side project, investigating the supernatural, aliens and Bigfoot and all of that stuff. 

She was working on it with another agent, Fox Mulder - how could that _possibly_ be someone’s name? In the movie it had looked like Fox Mulder was in love with her, but Luke knows movies are mostly bullshit.

On the other hand, he’d seen a picture of them together, and it provided pretty compelling evidence in favor of that theory.

It’s not hard to find pictures of Dr. Scully by herself. The hospital website has one. A medical journal. He found a picture of her at her 20-year college reunion, which is the only picture he’s seen of her smiling.

With a little digging Luke found one picture of Fox Mulder: a promo pic from that terrible movie, from a review that ran in _Entertainment Weekly_. The movie got panned, but the review mentioned the agents the movie characters were based on. And it had a picture.

It’s a picture of Dr. Scully and Fox Mulder. It doesn’t look posed. He’s holding something in his hands, a file maybe, and he’s standing so close to her that their arms are nearly touching. They’re looking at each other so the photo shows a three-quarter view of both of their faces.

And the way he’s looking at her. It looks like they’re in the middle of a conversation, and he’s looking at her _soft_ , somehow. It’s in the set of his jaw, in his eyes, in his shoulders as he turns toward her like his body doesn’t know how to do any different.

Luke couldn’t deny that he looked like the man in that picture. The same coloring, the same jawline. The same nose - he’d _always_ hated his nose, always, but he wondered how he’d feel about it if he’d grown up with the man who gave it to him.

And he wondered about that timeline, the one that said Dr. Scully went on the run barely a year after he was born. And he wondered how his mom ended up a fugitive, and he wondered if she’d had to choose between Luke and his - between Luke and this guy. 

He didn’t want to think about it that way. He didn’t know _what_ he wanted to think, only that his parents had always said that his birth mother wasn’t able to keep him, and _wasn’t able_ encompassed so very many possibilities.

His parents always said it was God’s will that brought him to their doorstep, that dropped him in a farm town thousands of miles away from his birth mother. His birth _parents_.

Because he knew. Whatever else Fox Mulder was to the FBI, to Dr. Scully, to the world - that guy was _definitely_ Luke’s father.

* * *

After they re-opened the X-files, it didn’t long for her and Mulder to settle into their new-old routine. Getting up early, staying up late. Lots of flashlights and lots of running. She replaced surgeries with autopsies and traded scrubs for suits, though she never went back to the heels - one had to make some concessions for age.

And it didn’t take long for him to move back in with her, in D.C., though they kept the cabin and used it as an actual cabin, an escape from the heat and the work.

She'd made that a condition: occasional escapes from work. So far it was working.

Something about her mother's death and their son's reappearance, so close together, had catalyzed her. He'd been begging her to come home since the day she left, but those fresh losses reminded her of how little time there really was.

Mulder was only a few years younger than her father had been when he died.

So the last two years had been - not _easy_ , that wasn’t something they knew how to do - but bearable in a way that the previous two (or twenty) years had not been. They were both getting better at leaving the work at work; some of Mulder’s frantic urgency had settled, finally.

“Must be getting old,” he’d sigh sometimes when she pointed it out.

He was older and so was she, and some of their edges were softening. It helped knowing that William - _Luke_ , she reminded herself - was out there. That he was safe. That he was happy. The question of his fate had been an empty space between her and Mulder, one that she’d never been able to fill or ignore.

Knowing made things easier. Made it easier to believe that she’d made the right choice - or at least an acceptable choice. Made it easier to be together: one less horror to contend with. She hardly ever had nightmares these days.

They were sitting around the apartment on a Saturday afternoon when the e-mail came. When she saw the name in the “from” line, she gasped. 

“Everything all right?” Mulder asked, getting up from the couch to stand over her.

She nodded mutely in the general direction of her laptop, and he leaned down to read over her shoulder, bracing his hands against the desk. “Whoa,” he said.

“Yeah.”

They read it together, in silence.

_Dear Dr. Scully,_

_I don’t know if you remember, but a couple years ago you met with me to discuss your work with anotia patients. I wanted to thank you: I ended up getting into Georgetown, my dream school, and I feel like you helped me do it._

_I’m here in D.C. now, and I was hoping you might want to meet for lunch so I could thank you in person. I’m done with classes at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if that works for you._

_If not, then just know that I appreciate the time you took to meet with me, and that I’m doing well. Thank you._

_Luke Van de Kamp_

“Do I get to come?” Mulder asked.

She looked up at him. “You think we should go?”

“Yeah. Of course. Why not?”

She sighed. “Mulder, it’s - doesn’t it seem unfair? We gave him up. What right do we have to…intrude on his life like this?”

“Scully, he’s the one asking.”

“I know, but—“

“He just wants to _know_.”

And when she met his eyes she saw that old familiar light, that desperation to know the truth, no matter what the cost. She hoped that her son hadn’t inherited that particular trait, but if he had - well, she’d devoted her life to Mulder’s search for the truth, and she certainly wouldn’t be the one to sabotage their son’s.

“I suppose.” She placed her right hand on top of his, just to feel the warmth there. “It doesn’t worry you?” she asked quietly.

He wrapped his arms around her from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder. She leaned back into the chair, into his embrace. “No,” he admitted. “Scully, if they wanted him, they’ve had seventeen years to track him down. I don’t think anyone is looking.”

She was quiet for a while. “Then what does that say about the reasons I gave him up?”

And he just held her.

* * *

Mulder’s nervous energy was starting to freak her out.

“You have to relax,” she hissed after he checked his watch for the eighth time.

“I know,” he ground out. She could feel his knee jiggling next to hers. He was like a little kid sometimes. It was only 1:04.

Mulder’s gaze lit on someone outside the window, and he nudged her. “Is that him?”

“Yeah,” Scully said, a little hoarsely. “That’s him.”

Together they watched him cross the street. Under the table, Mulder held her hand. She wanted to resent it, but she was just so glad to have him there.

“Hey,” he said, and she leaned into him.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“For what?”

She shook her head before she sat upright again, putting space back between them.

Scully made eye contact with Luke as soon as he walked in, and he grinned to see her. He walked over and slid into the seat across from them. Scully stretched her hand across the table, and he took it. “Nice to see you again, Luke,” she said.

“You too, Dr. Scully.”

Luke held his hand out to Mulder next, and Scully said, “This is my - this is Fox Mulder.”

“Mr. Mulder,” Luke said.

She could see the way his eyes scanned Mulder, looking for clues. She wondered if they would ever be able to speak the truth to one another - to say the things that they all so badly needed to hear.

“He - he wanted to meet you. I told him about you,” she said, but it sounded vacant and fake even to her own ears. She looked from Mulder to Luke and back. God, they looked so alike. _A refraction_ , she thought absently, and she was aware, also absently, that her breathing was starting to quicken. The heaviness in Mulder’s eyes, and Luke’s so bright and sharp and curious. Mulder had looked like that once, too. Hopeful.

They’d created a world where their son grew up in the sun, away from the shadows that had consumed his parents, and would the light in his eyes have dimmed if he’d stayed, if they’d kept him—

“Scully?” Mulder said, and she heard the concern in his voice but it barely registered.

She shook him off. “I’m fine. I’m sorry, I just - I need a minute. I’ll be right back.” She glanced briefly at Luke, offered him an apologetic smile. “Please. Just a minute.”

* * *

Which left Luke alone with Fox Mulder.

They evaluated each other over the table. He looked a lot older than he had in the picture, but that made sense; that picture had to be almost twenty years old.

“So,” Luke said. “You’re Dr. Scully’s…”

The older man’s jaw twitched. “Her partner.”

Luke wasn’t going to let him off that easily. “Like in the FBI, or…?”

“Something like that.” Mr. Mulder cleared his throat. “So, Georgetown, huh? Go Hoyas.”

Luke brightened. “Did you go to Georgetown?”

“Nah. But the Wizards are a joke, so Georgetown was the next best thing. You a basketball fan?”

“I played in high school,” Luke said. “Point guard, varsity.” He blushed. “Not that there was much competition. I grew up in a really small town. It’s not like I’m gonna play here.”

“That’s great.” Mr. Mulder was smiling now, and it was weird - it transformed his entire face. For some reason it bothered Luke.

“My dad said I had to play a sport, and I’m tall, so,” he said shortly, making sure to emphasize the _my dad_ part.

The smile faded. _Good_ , Luke thought. Of course, with the smile went the conversation, and Luke stared at Fox Mulder while Fox Mulder stared at the shellacked wooden table.

There were so many things he wanted to say.

He knew that Dr. Scully knew. He was pretty sure this guy knew. So why did it seem so impossible to speak the truth out loud?

“Why are you here?” Luke asked, finally, and Mr. Mulder looked up at him again. His eyes were so sad.

“I wanted to see you,” he said. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

The words got caught in Luke’s throat.

Was he okay? He knew what his classmates thought, from back home - they thought he was crazy, going halfway across the country for school. But he always felt like he’d made it. Out of his backwater cowtown, into the big city. The other kids on his hall at Georgetown clapped him on the back like he was part of their club, and he never said a word about where he came from.

Was he okay? He loved his parents but they didn’t understand him, not really; they’d wanted him to stay home and learn how to run the farm. Marry a girl from his high school and settle down, have all the babies his parents had never gotten to have. And here were these people, these shadow parents, in trendy city clothes and sunglasses. Well traveled and impossibly urbane, they were so many of the things he’d always wanted for himself.

But his parents had kept him. His parents had wanted him. And these people hadn’t.

“Yeah,” said Luke, his voice rough. “I’m okay.” And as he said it, he realized that it was mostly true.

“Your - Dr. Scully - Luke, she thinks about you all the time.” Once he finally choked out the words, they came out in a rush. “All of this is my fault. She never would have - she was in danger, and so were you, because of me.” He bit his lip. “She won’t ever say it, but I wanted - I wanted you to know.”

Luke didn’t say anything. What could he possibly say?

“She tried for _years_ ,” Mr. Mulder said, more quietly now. “She always wanted you. It was the hardest decision she ever made, giving you up.”

He heard that pronoun - the decision _she_ made. “And where were you?” He heard his own voice shaking, and he didn’t know if it was anger or fear or the sudden, deep sadness of finally knowing.

Mr. Mulder buried his face in his hands.

Luke asked, “Did _you_ want me?”

“I _loved_ you. More than I - I loved you both. I wanted to keep you safe.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“It was complicated. We didn’t have a normal life.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means - Luke, what was your life like, growing up?”

He narrowed his eyes. It seemed like a trick question. “I grew up on a farm,” he intoned, feeling like he was reciting his college application essays. “I helped my parents with the garden and the animals. I went to school in the closest town and had to get on the bus before dawn. After school I did chores and homework. On the weekends my mom would take me to the library in town and I’d hang out with friends from school.”

“Were you happy?”

“Mostly. I never really fit in.”

“Yeah, I think you inherited that from both of us.” He sighed. “Luke, we spent years on the run. We were living in motels and changing our names every three days. We’ve spent most of our lives chasing monsters and serial killers. That’s not - that’s no kind of life for a kid.”

“Why were you on the run?”

“It’s complicated.”

Luke shrugged. That was an insufficient answer.

Mr. Mulder wrapped his hands around his coffee mug and gripped it tight, but he finally met Luke’s eyes. “I was accused of something - something terrible. And it’s done now, they dropped the charges, but we were running for years.”

“And she went with you.”

Mr. Mulder hesitated. “Yes.”

Luke just let that sit.

“I know it’s hard to understand.”

“It’s not. Not really.” And it wasn’t. “She picked you.”

“It wasn’t like that—”

“Then _what was it like_?”

* * *

She didn’t know what she thought would happen in her absence, but it wasn’t this.

Mulder and Luke were staring at each other across the table, a weaponless Mexican standoff, and Mulder looked like he was about to lose his shit completely.

Cautiously, she walked back to the table and slid back into the booth. Neither of them looked at her. “Hey,” she said. Cautiously.

At some point their drinks had shown up, and Scully grabbed her cup of coffee with her left hand, letting the warmth leach into her skin. Faintly, she registered that Mulder was doing the same thing. Always in tandem.

Luke’s eyes flashed down to her cup and then his, and he laughed, a brittle thing. “You’re married.”

Scully’s eyes went wide, and she turned to Mulder, who still wouldn’t look at her. Luke must have spotted their rings. “Not exactly,” she said.

“What does that _mean_?”

She could hear the frustration in his voice, the sadness, the anger. This was a mistake. All of it. She should’ve left it, she shouldn’t have brought Mulder, she shouldn’t have thought this could end any other way. “We’re not - we’ve never done any of the paperwork.” God, what was she even saying?

Luke closed his eyes. “I just want to know the truth.”

This time Mulder did look at her. “What did you say to him?” she asked desperately.

Swallow, twitch, repeat. “The truth,” he said.

Her son’s face was bright and blurry and she was not going to cry, not here. “The truth,” she echoed.

“Yes,” her son said.

The waitress picked that moment to come over and ask for their lunch order, but Scully just held up her hand, and the young woman walked away in a hurry.

“Luke,” Scully started, but how do you start? How could she explain? “Mulder and I work for the FBI, on a project called the X-Files.”  
  
“I know. I saw the movie.”

Mulder shook his head and she glanced at him. “I told you someone was gonna see that movie,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.

“Okay, then you know that we investigate - unusual phenomena.”

Luke nodded.

“I can’t give you a…synopsis of twenty-six years,” Scully said, “but suffice it to say that we uncovered some dangerous things. Truths that dangerous men wanted to keep secret. We sacrificed a great deal in our search for these truths, and I - I was told that I wouldn’t be able to have children. I wanted to, desperately, but it was impossible.”

“But—“

“It wasn’t impossible,” she said, and she barely got the words out and she wasn’t going to cry, she hadn’t earned that, not with him. “You were a miracle. You were my miracle.”

Something in Luke’s face shifted, softened, and she didn’t deserve it and she didn’t care.

“Our lives were so dangerous,” she whispered, “and we didn’t know how to stop.” 

She felt Mulder’s hand on her knee, could feel the objection rising in him, but he was wrong. He blamed himself for William, for so much of the disaster that their lives became in those years, but she couldn’t give up either. She couldn’t stop either. In all these years, they never had.

She swallowed. “Your - your parents gave you things that we couldn’t have. A home, stability. A normal life. But I - we love you. We always have.”

Luke’s voice was so, so small when he spoke again. “That would have been enough.”

“Maybe.” She’d tried enough times to imagine it: William in all of those dingy motel rooms, learning to crawl. A twin bed in their unremarkable house. First days and skinned knees and bike rides and fear and love, and she could picture it all so clearly, this life she hadn’t chosen.

But she could picture other histories, too. One where William made them easy to find, where Mulder was caught and tried and executed. One where William was taken away by the same men who’d taken her. Those histories were as real as any other, and so much worse than the truth.

“It’s okay,” Luke said, and his eyes were red.

Scully shook her head. It wasn’t, but there was nothing to be done.

“I just always wondered.” He licked his lips, nervously, and the gesture was so familiar that it was almost the thing that broke her. “I’d rather know.”

* * *

The three of them walked out together, and for one brief shining second Scully let herself imagine that their life looked like this. If her family had been three instead of two. Their son, walking with them into the bright light of an autumn day.

“I should go,” Luke said to the pavement.

Scully swallowed her grief, looked him over like it was the last time. Maybe it was.

But then Luke came over and wrapped his arms around her. And hesitantly at first, she hugged him back.

Her son. She missed all of the years when he would have been shorter than her. Such a small thing. Such an impossible ache, all of those years.

He pressed his forehead against her shoulder. “I still have so many questions,” he mumbled.

She brought one hand up to pat the back of his head, the way her own mother had. “There’s still time,” she said quietly. And there was. There had to be.

After they let go Luke walked up to Mulder and shook his hand. They did that thing men do - pulling in from the handshake to pat each other on the back, gingerly, the same way she’d seen her own brothers hug their father decades ago.

“Good luck,” Mulder said. “Let us know if you need anything.”

The boy nodded, and they looked at each other. No one wanted to be the first to turn around.

Finally Scully took the leap. She had to have faith.

She’d seen a lot of horrors, but she’d seen her share of miracles, too. Luke knew where to find them.

She took Mulder’s hand and walked away, towards home.

* * *

Luke watched them walk away, watched her slip her hand into his. The movement looked unconscious. Twenty-six years was a long time. And life, he was starting to figure out, was long, too. At least when you were lucky.

And he was a lot of things, but when he thought about it, he’d always been lucky.

He’d see them again.

In his pocket, the phone rang. He pulled it out, and "Mom" flashed on the screen.

"Hey," he said, and listened to her response. "Yeah,  everything's going fine. I'm fine."

And he mostly was.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote & posted this ficlet to Tumblr back in June and...never updated it here. Honestly I mostly wrote it to make myself feel better about Father's Day? Anyway, here it is, super belatedly. I'd like to do some more of these eventually; we'll see what happens.

**January 2019**

Mulder's phone rang. As usual, he let it go a little longer than necessary - he liked that little song. Too bad Scully changed hers back to a regular ringtone. (Scully was, he suspected, a phone wizard. It had taken him a solid thirty minutes of Googling to figure out how to change her ringtone in the first place; she changed it back with little more than an eye roll and a few swipes. Wizardry.)

"Hey, Mr. Mulder?"

He almost dropped his glass of orange juice. "...Luke?"

"Yeah," the voice confirmed. "Hi."

This was new. Also slightly alarming: he hadn't heard from Luke since October, though he knew that Luke and Scully exchanged e-mails. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," Luke said quickly. "Yeah, everything's fine."

"Right," Mulder said, relieved, although maybe that was stupid. Scully, after all, would declare herself "fine" even if she was trapped in a cave or had just sliced off a finger or was on the phone with Bill Junior; her predisposition toward understatement was surely genetic. "What can I do for you?"

"This is kind of last minute, I know, but I was wondering if - so, my dad was supposed to come out this weekend to visit and I got us tickets to see a basketball game, but it turns out he can't make it, and I was wondering if maybe you would want to go?"

He said all of this extremely quickly. Mulder put his glass down on the kitchen table, then put himself in one of the chairs. It was a lot to process.

"Mr. Mulder?"

"Please," he said, "call me--" _Shit, what do I want him to call me?_ "Fox."

He could practically hear the kid grinning on the other end of the line. "You sure about that, Fox?"

[[MORE]]

Mulder winced and wished, not for the hundredth time, that his parents could have named him something normal. It would have been nice to have one normal thing in his life. "Good point," he admitted. "Mulder's fine, just...drop the 'mister', okay?"

"Sure. Anyway, it's no big deal, I can find someone to buy the tickets if you don't--"

"No, that would be great." Sure it would. It would definitely be fine. Not awkward. Not at all.

They agreed to meet outside Verizon Center half an hour before the game, then said goodbye. Just as they hung up, Scully walked in. "Was that Luke?" she asked, bending over to untie her sneakers. Back from the gym, red-faced and sweaty, she was still beautiful. And psychic, apparently.

"How did you--"

She raised an eyebrow. "How do you think he got your phone number?"

"Right." Wizard, indeed. He’s relieved that she isn’t actually psychic. ”I guess we're going to a basketball game."

"Should be fun."

"Scully, you hate basketball."

"True," she said agreeably, and dropped a quick kiss on the top of his head on her way to the bathroom.

Something occurred to him. "Scully, did Luke ask you first?"

"Can't hear you!" she called from the bathroom, and he heard the door shut.

He knew he was right, and it was a surprising development. Scully did hate basketball, but enough to pass up a chance to spend an evening with their son? Suspicious.

Extremely suspicious.

* * *

Mulder tried not to be a dork. He had a Hoyas shirt and a Hoyas cap, but he only wore the shirt. He shaved. He wore his winter coat, not his leather jacket - "it's thirty degrees out, Mulder, you'll freeze to death and it won't matter how young you look," Scully had insisted - and his good jeans.. 

As promised, Luke was waiting for him by the F Street station entrance. He was wearing a Georgetown sweatshirt - no coat, no mittens, nothing, even though this was about as cold as D.C. ever got. _Wyoming_ , Mulder reminded himself. It was freezing all the time there, right?

They walked into the arena together, and Luke handed both their tickets over to be scanned. "Have you been here before?" Mulder asked.

Luke shook his head. "The tickets are kind of expensive. I thought it would be a fun treat for my dad, but..."

"What happened?"

"Appendicitis." Mulder winced and Luke must've noticed, because he added, "He's okay, but he had to have surgery last weekend, so he couldn't really fly out here, and my mom has to stay and take care of him, so…”

"I'm sorry to hear that," Mulder said, and meant it. "Thanks for, uh - thanks for inviting me."

Luke shrugged like it was nothing, and they settled into their seats - not in the student section, Mulder noted with some relief - and waited for the game to start.

Sure, they weren’t talking, but it was a friendly silence. The players came out and they cheered along with everyone else. This was good. A low-pressure evening, no need to make small talk. Every few minutes one of them commented on the game, and it was just like watching basketball with a friend at a bar.

By halftime, Georgetown was up forty-five to thirty. “My dad would’ve loved this,” said Luke. “Ever since I got in he’s been following, like, every team at Georgetown. I think their basketball team is the main reason he wasn’t mad at me for going so far away from home.”

Mulder nodded. “What’s your dad like?” he asked, and found that he really wanted to know.

Their eyes met, and Luke thought about it. “Generous,” he said finally. He didn’t elaborate.

“I’m glad,” he said quietly. “They told Scully - er, Dana - that you were with a good family, but I know…we always wondered.”

For a minute Luke didn’t respond, and Mulder worried that he’d said something wrong. But when he looked over, Luke was grinning.

“You guys really call each other by your last names, huh?”

Mulder actually laughed. “Yeah.”

“That's so weird.”

"No kidding," he said dryly.

“I’m working on it, you know,” Luke said after Georgetown sunk two three-pointers in a row. “Like. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. My mom thinks it would be good for me to get to know you. She thinks maybe it would answer some questions that I have.”

Mulder didn’t say anything, just looked over at his son. Luke’s profile was so familiar, staring out at the court, serious and thoughtful. The past could not be undone.

“She also says,” and Luke licked his lips and swallowed hard, “that it’s always better to have more love than less, and that if folks want to be in your life you should let them.”

Mulder’s throat constricted. Luke looked over at him.

“So,” his son said.

“It sounds like your mom gives good advice.” _It sounds like your mom is literally a saint._

Luke nodded, wordlessly.

Georgetown won easily, eighty to sixty-two, and they filed out of the arena. Mulder gestured toward the Metro stop. “You taking the red line?”

Luke shook his head. “Nah. There’s a bus for students that’s only a couple bucks, so I’m gonna take that.”

“Well, thanks for uh - bringing me along.”

There was a ghost of a smile on his son’s face. “You’re pretty good company. You know your basketball.”

“That I do.”

“Tell Dana I said hi.”

“I will.”

They parted ways, but a second later he heard Luke’s voice over the crowd. “Hey Mulder!”

He turned. Luke was grinning again. “Next time you can get the tickets.”

* * *

Scully was sprawled out on the couch with her feet up when Mulder got home. “How was the game?” she asked.

“Do you care?”

She shrugged. “Give me a brief synopsis.”

“Georgetown won,” he said, hanging up his coat, kicking off his shoes. He made sure they ended up in the corner vaguely near Scully’s. “Do you want any more information?”

“Not really.”

He picked up her feet and sat down, then put her feet back across his thighs. “Tell me how I ended up at that basketball game, Scully.”

“Luke and I communicate a lot,” she said. “I thought it might be good for you to spend some time together, one on one.”

“Is that all?”

Scully looked at him. “Mostly.”

“And?”

“And I really hate basketball.”

He pulled himself up toward her, stretching himself out along the couch between Scully and the cushions. “You’re a bad liar,” he said, rubbing his nose along hers. “But thank you.”

She kissed him. “You’re welcome.”

“Luke said that next time I had to get the tickets,” he said. “How do you feel about baseball?”

“I have some fond memories of baseball,” she said, and she took his hand and moved it to rest on her hip.

Mulder grinned. “Then it’s a deal.”


End file.
